Jan de Leeuw is distinguished professor and chair at the Department of Statistics, University of California at Los Angeles. He has a 1973 Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Leiden, Netherlands. He came to UCLA in 1987, after leading the Department of Data Theory at the University of Leiden for about 10 years.

His research is in psychometrics, multivariate analysis, multilevel analysis, and computational statistics. He has published several books and hundreds of research papers. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Royal Statistical Society. He is the editor in chief of the Journal of Multivariate Analysis, the founding and current editor of the Journal of Statiatical Software, a former editor of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, a former president of the Psychometric Society, and a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.